


An Interview

by LiquidMirrors



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Horror, Spoilers for the Unknowing (kind of), Weird fiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-09
Updated: 2020-02-09
Packaged: 2021-02-28 01:21:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22635850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LiquidMirrors/pseuds/LiquidMirrors
Summary: An interrogation between an unnamed author and an unidentifiable stranger.
Relationships: None
Kudos: 6





	An Interview

[ **Preface:** Archival Object #3357 is a notebook that was discovered in Storage Room 326 hidden behind an extensive stack of reports. It is of note that Storage Room 326 is meant to hold reports that occurred between 1985-2000. It is estimated that most entries in AO #3357 were written between 1990 and 1998.]

[Segment A4 of AO #3357. Potential information about The Mask's ritual, please be weary as this later breaks the interview form. The assumed voice of the Wearer is in **bold**.] 

What does The Unknowing look like?

**Oh, that is an easy answer. It takes the form of a dance!**

Who is dancing?

**Well, the Dancers, of course!**

Who are the Dancers?

**Not a who, Scribe. A what.**

Okay, _what_ are the Dancers?

**The Dancers look like people, but they hide!**

What do you mean?

**Is this so hard for you to understand?**

Yes and no. I need to understand in order to write this down.

 **You are no fun! So sterile and somber - you only want the** **_information_ ** **to hide away in your books thinking that we will be able to** **_read_ ** **them! What you're doing is useless!**

You're wrong. _Somebody_ will read it.

**Who? Who will read it, Scribe? When you're dead like the former Archivists, buried in a coffin and giving yourself to the Powers that you have despised for oh so long?**

I don't care anymore. Tell me about The Unknowing.

**You are no fun.**

_Tell me._

**_Fine._ ** **I will tell you, but in a way that makes it just as bizarre.**

How do I know you're not feeding me bullshit? 

**Well, you don't! Isn't that funny?**

No, it isn't.

**Close your eyes, Enscriber.**

I don't want to.

**Then you won't get your wish!**

Fine. I will. Though, be warned, if you _do_ kill me, others will come in my place to collect payment. We both know that you pay your dues in this sort of business.

**Oh come now with the drivel, boy. You sound like Jonah. Now…**

_...close your eyes._

[The following segment was partially illegible until turned over to a forensic document examiner.]

_The Unknowing takes the form of a dance. The music does not sound like music, and it is unusual and upsetting to the ears. Gears on gears, the screeching of metal, the clashing of piano keys or the whistle of a calliope. This unusual symphony will soon take shape, and mold into something more bizarre. The Dancers will then enter the stage, twisting and moving in a choreography never practiced but perfected in its unusual way. For your hands, as you watch, would no longer become your hands, and your hands would now be those of a stranger deal, stumbling across what used to be a ceiling underneath only for the bastions to either side will close in. The Dancers will spin in their forms at the time, whether automata or plastic, donned in colorful clothes, the Angler dressed up in cloaks of the transformed and new face..._

_It looked like a tent, which was strange to me. It was happening in a wax museum, after all. If it was happening in a theater - a wax museum - a doll factory - a department store, why would it look like a tent? The stripes were beige and red, with lights that swirled and spun, and Dancers spinning in tandem on the stage and spreading out in mesmerizing patterns in graceful yet unnatural movements, swift yet jarring, as well as any mannequin or wooden doll or machine could move, with joints that aren't supposed to bend, but do. See, they would be wearing skin, or maybe their proportions would feel a little more unusual, for if the elbow isn't the knee yet the knee crashes to the ground in a shout made of gurgling blood._

_Whatever the given case, in ad nauseum and disastrous intent, mixed in part with the ceiling underneath me and the whirring sounds of brass brazen colors, the thing, objectium, at the center of the stage would sicken and terrify me, if I would even be capable of Knowing what it is at that very moment. Despite the wheezing steam and melting sound, the flesh that danced and skittered and creaked around me, I was somehow aware of Me and I was aware of It._

_See, the Angler was dressed in skin. While it stood, enormously at the center, it was an amalgam of flesh and body parts that were haphazardly thrown together. Its head was bulbous, a newborn baby whose neck is too feeble to support its bloated skull, flopping and tilting as it struggled to stare up into the ceiling. Oh, it had a mouth, one that seemed to stretch far too wide for its face, and filled with countless individual teeth, human teeth, ivory and filling a maw that moved, bent, and folded in ways that were only possible if there was no jaw or jawbone to speak of. Where the drapery of pink and tans and browns ended was a mechanical disaster of wood and steel, a thing that propped it up in the center, its true disgust hidden by another spectacle, rooting itself and unable to detach its disgusting form from that point._

_It is probably for the best that the Angler didn't leave its place. It jolted and jerked around, moaning and babbling, attempting to speak, but nothing it said made any sense whatsoever. The performers circled around it, still dancing and doing their tricks, when something that resembled a ballerina caught me by the elbow and led me into the thrall. If I am to be honest, I was too frenzied and confused to fight back, and, in a way, it truly was a beautiful dance. Some moved freely, while others were spurred on by gears and poles that jutted through the floor, leading underneath to the center console that was, yes, the base of the disgusting Angler. A suit of armor with rouge on its cheeks and a blue painted visor galloped past, and when it took me from the ballerina and led me away from her pale arms and many-fingered palms, I grasped its hand firmly, attempting to root myself in a sensation I knew but couldn't describe. Its gauntlet dislocated from its body as we danced, and I was left holding the empty shell of a hand that still clasped around my own. Will it surprise you if I said there was no-one in the suit, that it was hollow inside? No, I do not believe so._

_We spun in ballroom circles around floorboards and bodies that were malleable and not. Cold hands, hollow shell. When I looked into its visor for too long, a voice would slither from its mouth, whispering that it adored the way my skin creased when I smiled. It was obsessed with the perfect imperfections of my teeth, my gums, my eyes, and how it would like to borrow them, "just for a short while," and in my thoughts I saw an open helmet, visor revealing a dark inside where lidless eyes stared, and a round of teeth grin, bloodstained yet still a perfect pearly white, with my own left incisor bent inwards slightly, as it always would be. I did not even notice its metal fingers reaching into my mouth until I was pulled away by another Dancer. My gums tasted like copper and red stained my lips, dribbling down the front of my shirt. It was my left incisor - it was gone, and there was nothing where it should have been._

_The music kept churning, and I felt my organs shifting, rearranging, like they were making room in there for something else. The new Dancer, done up in peacock feathers and peacock heads, held my hands and said that I could look beautiful like her, and all we'd need was to remove those pesky "things." She let go of one of my hands, pulling out a knife that was hidden in a finely sewn sleeve. She used the point of the blade to gesture to my abdomen. Her skin was slowly sloughing off her wooden frame, taxidermy falling limp. I blinked. I'm -_

_The knife stabbed deep, and she pulled down, towards my navel and I -_

_Her face was falling off now, leaving brownish-red streaks on the smooth featureless face of a wood mannequin, animated by some force I could see on the corners of my mind, a force that didn't look right, that fundamentally stood like a person but wasn't, glassy smile stretched too far and fake teeth and shiny eyes, and - I Do Not Know You, I Do Not Know You, Who Are You, you are their boss, and you're a silhouette and I don't want to look as the music swells to an ecstatic high, and the Angler screams - or does it Sing? - and the dancing speeds up and everyone - everyTHING - cries out as a response, a song answered, and in the center something is rising up, something bigger than the room that somehow fits within its walls, the ceiling stretching upwards, downwards to almost welcome and accompany it, and - I blink. I start screaming. The whole world screams and sings as an answer, and everything is quickly Unknown, and the Stranger, the Ringmaster, the head is revealed in pinstripes and buttons and faces and I know now that nothing is true and I should fear and that yet the smiles are expressions of sorrow and their frowns are joyful and very afraid and I -_

[Three pages are missing. There are signs that suggest they were forcibly torn out.]

You lied. You said you'd tell me. You _said_ I'd be _fine._

**I may have said yes, Scribe, but I never explicitly said YES to any of those things!**

It took a tooth. You could use it against me.

**Oh, Scribe, if you only knew. If you only knew everything your dreams tell you. How wonderful.**

This is over, we're done. That's it.

**It never really is, Scribe.**

**It never.**

**Really.**

**Is.**

[Segment Ends.]

**Author's Note:**

> I know that these non-conventional fics I make don't get a lot of clicks, but I still really enjoy writing them! 
> 
> This past fall, I had a dream where I was stuck sitting at a table across from this thing that looked like a person but really wasn't. After all, its mostly dream logic, which means that there aren't a lot of specifics - you only know what is explicitly told to you, verbally or otherwise.
> 
> I was asking it questions and it kept avoiding straight answers, or it would be ridiculously vague. I wanted to know what the Unknowing was, and it soon got frustrated and decided to just show me. When I woke up the following morning, I felt... well, strange. In class, I wrote down as much as I could, filling in the blanks with what most likely occurred.
> 
> Its really weird that even in my dream, I couldn't wrap around what The Stranger looked like when it sort of "ascended."
> 
> That's dreams for you, I guess.


End file.
